Link Bait

What is link bait and where can I get some?

As I am sure you already know, having lots of relevant inbound links to your site can greatly increase the amount of traffic your site receives. Not only do you receive more traffic from the link source itself, but you will also gain a better position in search engines which will in turn increase your organic results. Simply put, link popularity increases Google page rank and other search engines’ ranking factors.

Link baiting is the SEO technique used to encourage other websites to link to you. Below I have listed some of the best ways of doing this:

• Write useful and informative content that people want to link to
• Write a custom web application that people can place on their own website
• Design an WordPress theme or plug-in
• Encourage members of your websites to link back to your site when they join

All of the above named methods have one thing in common – there is incentive for people to link to you: they get something out of it. If you write a truly original article, people are going to use it as a reference or source of information. If you offer a useful online tool it goes without saying people will link to it.

Another important consideration at this point is to make it easy for people to link to you. You could provide easy to use copy and paste code which has your logo or graphic, along with the link and any anchor text. A great place to get links from are online communities and social bookmarking sites such as digg, reddit, furl and del.icio.us.

The very nature of online communities allows for the exponential growth of the sharing of information, resources and tools.

An easy way to let people bookmark you.

Have a look at the little widget below.

Pretty cool hey?

I have started using this on most of my sites now and have found it very effective. Simply go to addthis.com to download your copy for free. By the way, you might notice that what addthis.com have done is create link bait in the form of a useful little tool. Clever idea, now why didn’t I think of that? It is in the interest of people to use the tool, it encourages traffic for the site owner and the developers have received a ton of traffic in return from such a simple idea.

Be careful who links to you.

Having loads of inbound links is great, but some of them can damage your SEO efforts. Links from disreputable link farms, warez and porn sites can be damaging because search engines such as Google penalise these results. Also sites that copy your content while linking to you can damage results. A good thing to do is use the major search engines to see who is linking to you, and if you don’t like the look of what you see, send them an email and hopefully they will remove it.